Adolescent Adult Sensory Profile Catana Brown

Understanding the Sensory Profile for Teens and Adults

The Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile is an occupational therapy assessment tool developed by Catherine Brown, Ph.D., OTR/L, and colleagues at Western Connecticut State University. It measures how people process sensory information in daily life, covering domains like auditory, visual, tactile, vestibular, and proprioceptive processing. The tool exists in two main forms: the questionnaire format (self-report or observer-rated) and the more detailed Sensory Profile 2 which expanded the original. I should note right away that there is no version called the "Catana Brown" Sensory Profile. Catherine Brown is the researcher behind it. Someone may have misheard or misspoken when referring to it. The correct name is simply the Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile, authored by Catherine Brown and her research team. I have dealt with this confusion multiple times when clients or colleagues asked me to look something up under a slightly wrong name, so I want to make sure you know what you are actually searching for. The profile was first published around 2001 and later updated as the Sensory Profile 2 in 2018. It is designed for individuals aged 11 through adulthood, which is why there is a separate Adolescent/Adult version from the children's version. The assessment takes roughly 15 to 20 minutes to complete in questionnaire form and provides a behavioral profile based on how frequently someone exhibits certain sensory responses.

How the Assessment Actually Works

The tool uses a Likert-scale questionnaire format. Respondents rate how often specific behaviors occur, using options like "always," "usually," "sometimes," "rarely," and "never." The original Adolescent/Adult version contains 125 items, while the newer Sensory Profile 2 has 150 items across seven sensory domains. Scoring involves converting raw responses into standard scores and percentile ranks, then grouping results into performance categories. Those categories are generally defined as follows:

• "Expected" — the person's responses align with what typical sensory processing looks like
• "Distinctly different" — responses deviate noticeably from the norm but the person functions without major difficulty
• "More than expected" — the person seems to experience or respond to sensory input more intensely than most people
• "Much more than expected" — responses are significantly elevated and likely cause real interference in daily activities

What I find useful in practice is that the profile does not diagnose anything. It does not tell you whether someone has autism, ADHD, or a sensory processing disorder. It tells you where their sensory responses cluster and how unusual they are compared to a normative sample. That distinction matters a lot because clinicians sometimes misinterpret high scores as a diagnosis rather than a descriptive finding. The Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile has real limitations that anyone using it should know about upfront. The normative sample for the original version was drawn largely from white, middle-class populations in the northeastern United States, which means scores may not generalize well across different cultural or socioeconomic groups. People from different backgrounds may express sensory comfort and discomfort in culturally specific ways that the questionnaire does not capture. Another problem is the self-report nature of the tool. Many adolescents and adults lack insight into their own sensory processing patterns. They may genuinely not notice that they avoid certain sounds, textures, or environments, or they may rationalize avoidance as personal preference rather than sensory reactivity. Observer-rated versions exist but introduce rater bias, where the person filling out the form projects their own interpretation onto the respondent.

I encountered a specific case where a 17-year-old client scored remarkably "expected" on the self-report version despite clearly displaying sensory avoidance in school. His mother filled out the observer-rated version separately and his scores were dramatically different across the social participation and visual audition domains. The discrepancy turned out to be significant — he had learned to mask his reactions socially and did not recognize them as sensory issues at all. This is not a rare edge case. Masking is common among adolescents, particularly those who are neurodivergent and have spent years learning to suppress obvious responses. The workaround I used in that situation was straightforward but requires extra time. I had both the self-report and observer-rated versions completed independently, then compared the domain profiles for divergences. Where the gap was large, I treated it as potential masking and shifted the clinical focus toward the observer-rated results. That approach doubled the completion time but produced a much more accurate picture. If you only have one version completed, you should note that limitation in any report or documentation.

Getting the Tool

The Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile is a commercially published assessment owned by PAR (Prometheus Assessment Resources). It is not freely available for download. You must purchase it through PAR or an authorized distributor, and you typically need to be a qualified professional — an occupational therapist, psychologist, or other licensed clinician — to administer and interpret it. The cost runs several hundred dollars for the full kit, which includes the questionnaire booklets, scoring forms, and manual. The Sensory Profile 2 replaced the original version and is now the preferred instrument. It offers additional scales, improved normative data, and better alignment with current diagnostic frameworks. If you are starting fresh, the Sensory Profile 2 is the version to buy rather than the older Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile. The transition between versions is not seamless either, because the item wording and scaling changed slightly, which matters if you are trying to compare historical scores against new ones.

Practical Tips for Using It

When you administer the profile, make sure the respondent understands what each item is asking. Words like "loud" and "distracting" carry different meanings depending on context. I usually give people a brief example before they start so they know whether to rate based on home, work, or school settings. The questionnaire does not specify which setting to use, and mixing settings during completion introduces noise into the scores. Pay attention to the social participation domain if you are working with adolescents. That domain captures how sensory responses affect peer interaction and group activities, which is often the first area where sensory processing differences become visible in teenage environments. School-based referrals frequently trigger after a student struggles in group work or noisy cafeteria settings, even though the same student functions perfectly well in quiet one-on-one situations. The profile generates several subcategory scores beyond the overall summary. The eight subcategories include sensory seeking, sensitivity, avoiding, low registration, sensory craving, sensory sensing, auditory filtering, and imbalance. Each one tells a different story. A person can score "expected" overall but show "much more than expected" on the auditory filtering subcategory, which means they have a specific deficit in filtering background noise rather than a broad sensory processing issue. That granularity is why the full profile matters more than the global score alone.

If you are considering alternatives, the Sensory Processing Measure (SPM) and the Adolescent and Adult Sensory Profile are different tools despite overlapping purposes. The SPM has stronger validity evidence across broader populations and includes informant versions from teachers and employers. The Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile is more widely used in clinical settings but has narrower validity generalization. Neither tool replaces a full occupational therapy evaluation, and treating them as standalone diagnostic instruments is a mistake I see more often than I would like.

When Not to Use It

The profile is not appropriate for people with significant cognitive impairment or limited language ability. The questionnaire requires reading comprehension at roughly a fifth-grade level, and the concepts are abstract enough that lower cognitive functioning affects score reliability. It is also not useful as a screening tool in general medical settings where the follow-up capacity is limited. Finding a pattern on the profile means very little without a plan for what to do with that information. The tool also does not account for medical conditions that affect sensory processing directly, such as hearing loss, vestibular disorders, or neurological conditions. A high score in the visual audition domain could reflect undiagnosed hearing issues rather than sensory processing differences. Any professional using this profile should rule out sensory organ pathology before interpreting the results as central nervous system phenomena. I stopped recommending the original Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile to trainees about two years ago and shifted them toward the Sensory Profile 2 exclusively. The update addressed several psychometric weaknesses, including better factor structure and expanded age range coverage. The older version still produces valid scores, but the incremental improvements in the newer edition make it the better choice unless you have an existing data set built on the original that requires continuity for longitudinal comparison.